How To Retrieve the URL of a Web Page from an ActiveX Control

Retired KB Content Disclaimer

This article was written about products for which Microsoft no longer offers support. Therefore, this article is offered "as is" and will no longer be updated.

Summary

This article demonstrates how an ActiveX control can retrieve the UniformResource Locator (URL) of the Web page (document) on which it is beinghosted.

This may be useful for restricting usage of an ActiveX control to aparticular domain/site or accessing files when supplied a relative path.

More information

During the initialization of an embedded ActiveX control, Internet Explorer(IE) passes a pointer to its client site by callingIOleObject::SetClientSite(). This process can be used to either retrieve amoniker for the container or access the document object model to retrievethe URL for the hosting Web page.

This article demonstrates how to retrieve the current URL from thecontainer moniker. For additional information about how to obtain the URL from thedocument object model, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

172763 INFO: Accessing the Object Model from Within an ActiveX Control

Follow these steps to retrieve the current URL from the container moniker:

Obtain the client site (IOleClientSite) interface pointer. The container calls IOleObject::SetClientSite() to pass a pointer to the client site. Override this method to cache this pointer.

Obtain a moniker to the client site by calling IOleClientSite::GetMoniker().

Call IMoniker::GetDisplayName() to obtain the URL for the current document.

The following sample code demonstrates how to perform the above steps byoverriding the IOleObject::SetClientSite() method in an Active TemplateLibrary (ATL) ActiveX control: